The Worst Part of Donald Trump’s Visit to the Civil-Rights Museum

Donald Trump was a problematic presence at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, in Jackson.

Photograph by Susan Walsh / AP

On June 9, 1963, Annelle Ponder and Fannie Lou Hamer, two activists
connected to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were
arrested in Winona, Mississippi, as they returned from a training
program in Charleston, South Carolina. By that time, Mississippi had
arrested scores of civil-rights workers in an effort to stall the
movement, often sending them to Parchman Farm—a facility that originated
as a plantation and was seamlessly turned into a prison in the early
twentieth century. Hamer’s life was, in a way, an anthology of the
various cruelties that the Magnolia State had on offer for its black
residents: she grew up sharecropping, in Ruleville, and had been
sterilized without her knowledge—a violation so common that it was known
as the “Mississippi appendectomy.” In Winona, the police took her and
Ponder to a jail, where they ordered male inmates to take turns beating
the women. Hamer reportedly needed more than a month to recover from her injuries.

Brutality was central to the system of racial hierarchy known as Jim
Crow, and Mississippi managed to distinguish itself in the
administration of it, which is part of the reason that the opening, this
past weekend, of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, in Jackson, is a
milestone in the state’s history. The transition from the Mississippi
where the civil-rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael
Schwerner were murdered, for trying to register black voters, to the
state with the largest number of black elected officials in the country
is a testament to the will of all those who risked death in the hope of
creating a more humane world.

But the circumstances under which that museum opened remind us, again,
that progress is neither inevitable nor necessarily permanent. Donald
Trump’s planned visit to the museum prompted the congressmen Bennie
Thompson, who represents the only majority-black district in
Mississippi, and John Lewis, of Georgia, who is a former chairman of SNCC, to announce that they would boycott the opening. Sarah Huckabee
Sanders criticized Lewis’s decision and seemed to suggest that he lacked
respect for the civil-rights movement that he had helped lead. It was
noted that Trump appeared at the museum, where he told an
invitation-only audience that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been a
personal inspiration, just a day after attending a rally, in Florida,
where he again endorsed a candidate for the U.S. Senate who thinks that
Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress, and who recently
told an African-American man that America had been “great” during
slavery. Trump, who has caused racial offense on occasions too numerous
to note here, would have been a problematic presence at the museum for
his anti-Obama birtherism alone. Yet there he was in Jackson, saying,
“Today, we pay solemn tribute to our heroes of the past, and dedicate
ourselves to building a future of freedom, equality, justice, peace.”

Since his emergence as a political figure, Trump has been the conductor
of the orchestra of chaos that American politics has become. Early on,
his supporters gravitated to the prospect of a leader who could transfer
the principles of business to government, but they overlooked a crucial
pitfall. Trump has governed like the president of a company that is
hesitant to expand beyond its target demographic, for fear of diluting
its brand. That his brand is known for a kind of truculent
self-glorification has only complicated matters. Trump never seems more
ill at ease or more defensive than when he is called on to represent an
ideal that stands for something broader than the self, particularly when
that ideal calls for sacrifice. Many of the targets of his
disrespect—Senator John McCain, the parents of Army Captain Humayun
Khan, the widow of Army Sergeant La David Johnson, even officials of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation—have intimately known the capacity of
Americans to subordinate their own interests and safety to those of the
larger community.

In Trump’s case, “We, the People” has been replaced by “I, the Person.”
The problem, then, is not only that, as Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, of
Jackson, said last week, Trump advocates policies that run counter to
the objectives of the civil-rights movement. It is that the ethic
of seeking commonality rather than division, of enduring insults rather
than retaliating for them, of withstanding punishment in service of a
civic ideal—in short, anything that might have sustained Annelle Ponder,
Fannie Lou Hamer, and the countless other heroes of the civil-rights
movement—is apparently alien to the President of the United States.

Thus, the museum in Jackson serves a dual purpose, which was on display
on Saturday, as Trump toured the building and John Lewis stayed away
from it: to remind the public of history and to serve as an object
lesson of some of the same concerns in the present, when one white
supremacist murders churchgoers and others march through the streets of
a Southern city. History is a bullet whistling through the dark toward
Medgar Evers, as he stood in the driveway of his home, in Jackson; it is
the ruined body of Emmett Till, pulled from the Tallahatchie River; it
is Vernon Dahmer, who led voter-registration efforts in Hattiesburg and
died after the Klan burned down his home, calling from his deathbed for
the struggle to continue. This has been the cost of progress.
Mississippi, the South, and the United States have all travelled a great
distance since 1963. But, from a distance, a mile marker and a headstone
can appear indistinguishable.